Guilty Gear Strive Producer Talks Lucy From Cyberpunk Edgerunners - Evo 2024

ign.com:

Guilty Gear Strive is now entering its fourth year of content updates, and despite now earning the reptutation as being the "old man" on the block, especially when put side-to-side with more recent releases like Street Fighter 6, Tekken 8, and Mortal Kombat 1, Strive is still continuing on just as strong as ever.

Which brings us to Evo 2024, where Arc System Works made perhaps their biggest announcement involving Guilty Gear Strive to date: In addition to two returning characters, Dizzy and Venom, and one brand new character, Unika, they would also be adding their first guest character to the roster: Lucy from Cyberpunk Edgerunners. I got a chance to catch up with Guilty Gear Strive Producer Ken Miyauchi to find out how this surprising collaboration came to be, along with getting some insight regarding Strive's future.

IGN: We learned that Lucy from Cyberpunk Edgerunners is going to be in Strive. Can you talk a little bit about how long this has been in the works and how this collaboration came around?

Ken Miyauchi, Guilty Gear Strive Producer: So yeah, we've tried to find who will be a good guest character for Guilty Gear Strive. And we've been doing this work since 2023, actually. And we've been talking to CD PROJEKT RED because our lead artist, Hidehiko Sakamura, is actually a big fan of The Witchers series. And we've been in talks with CD PROJEKT RED, and then there was several conversation going on and that kind of led to the decision to get Lucy from Cyberpunk Edgerunners.

Now, I'm not opposed to the idea of Lucy, but Lucy's not the main character of Cyberpunk Edgerunners, David is. What made you want to go with Lucy instead of David?

Miyauchi: So I cannot talk much about why because that might spoil what we are trying to do. But there is a reason we decided Lucy. Of course, I personally wanted to see David with Sandevistan, but yeah, so I can't talk about it right now, but I hope people will figure [it] out in the future.

Is there any kind of collaboration